Genealogy or the gathering of family information concerning ancestors and descendants has become an extremely popular pastime. Searching out ancestor relationships and histories has spawned many industries, one of which is a prolific software community. Software is used to store and view family histories, relationships, individual data such as birth and death dates and places, religious affiliations and rites, personal histories etc.
The genealogy software presently available uses the fundamental formats of a sheet called a “family group sheet” and a sheet called a “pedigree chart” for their basic display formats. Pedigree charts are used in many other areas including animal pedigrees and genetic pedigrees. Pedigrees are based on a common data structure known as “tree logic”, where one piece of datum is connected to another piece of datum with graphical lines. These fundamental concepts and drawings representing pedigrees have been around for hundreds of years.
However, current genealogy software programs have essentially digitized the existing concepts of the “family group sheet” and the “pedigree chart” using pre-windows technology. The programs use DOS based concepts to manipulate and manage the genealogy data. Because these computer software programs use this limiting concept, it can be difficult to see relationships and lineages, manipulate data, add data into correct positions, see relationships and see different views of the data. Present software programs are also limited in their ability to identify and display unlinked data in the database. Once an individual is unlinked, the individual and the connected nodes “disappear” from the user's view and it is difficult for the user to see and understand what has been unlinked in the database.
Further, sharing of information between genealogy users is very common. One major problem in present genealogy programs is the data export selection process. If a user wants to give part of his genealogy to a relative, he must go through a tedious selection process. Even then, it is not clear what he has selected and transferred without another tedious audit of the new information. Likewise, when receiving information from someone else, importing that information into a user's database can cause horrendous problems and weeks of work to unravel the conflicts created by the import.
Accordingly, a need exists for a software program that gives the user a graphical view of his database which he can then easily manipulate using the graphical interface. Such a device is disclosed herein.